Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Excerpt & GiveAway: Fury by Charlotte McConaghy

SummaryWhen emotions are erased from the world, creating a civilization of mindless drones, only those with fury can survive.

On the same day each year Josephine Luquet wakes naked, shivering and covered in blood that is not her own. Under the cold gaze of the blood moon she is someone else entirely, but when dawn breaks her memories flee and she is left with only an icy horror, a burning fury. Amid a sea of drones, she alone hasn’t been cured. It will be the same each year: atrocities forgotten, truths hidden and pieces of herself left to die. Until Luke. He isn’t like the other drones. With secrets whispering behind his eyes and a hunger for all things Josephine, he is the only one determined to help her discover the truth before the next blood moon rises. But time is running out. Is Luke willing to risk his life to be near her? Does he truly understand what violence she is capable of? Raw and full of passion, Fury is a story of love in a dystopian world, and how much we are willing to forgive in the struggle to remember our humanity.

Excerpt

September 11th, 2065

Josephine

I am a flame of fury. The last flickering flame in a world long since burned out. I have rage threaded through my skin, whispering against my ears, tied tightly around each one of my bones. My eyes, one brown and one blue, leak with it.

Most of the time this frightens me.

But sometimes I like it.

*

“When did it happen to you?”

He appears to be reading something but I figured out a while ago that he sits there and stares at a blank clipboard. God only knows why. Maybe he thinks it makes him seem smarter, or more aloof. I roll my eyes and turn them to the sky outside the window. A hint of dark gray is edging across the blue, and I can feel the static of a rising storm across my skin. I imagine being inside it, right in the heart of it, wild and out of control, but I only imagine this for the briefest of moments, because otherwise it starts to hurt too much.

“What?” Anthony asks. I know full well that he heard me perfectly the first time, so I don’t repeat myself. After a pause he says, “Nine years ago.”

“So you were … what—twelve?”

“Hilarious.”

“How old are you?” I sit up and face him.

“None of your business.”

“You’re in a friendly mood today. Aren’t you supposed to support every word I say?”

He shoots me a look that says at this point I couldn’t care less what I’m supposed to be doing with you. He is so tired. I can see it in his blue eyes and in the set of his mouth. I feel a moment of pity but it doesn’t last long because he wrecks it by saying, “Have you been taking your pills?”

“No. I seduced all the nurses on staff so that they skip me when it’s time for rounds.”

He actually looks alarmed, which is amusing.

“Yes, I take them. And they don’t do anything, like I’ve told you a thousand times.”

“That remains to be seen,” he says sternly. What a dick.

“You don’t look that much older than me, but you act like you’re eighty, Doc.”

He looks at me blankly and I grin. Antagonising Anthony Harwood is undoubtedly the only fun I have left in my life.

“Let’s talk about Luke,” he suggests.

The grin is wiped clean from my face. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“Why don’t you want to?”

I lick my lips and then meet his eyes. “For the same reason I’ve requested a new therapist. You don’t understand, Anthony. You don’t understand anything.”

He looks pale as he glances down at his clipboard, as though searching for an answer. He’s on the small side of medium height and medium build, and he’s pretty much the definition of the word average. Except he does have nice eyes when he smiles. I only worked that out recently, because he’s smiled all of three times in the entire year. His dark hair is prematurely graying at the temples, which he probably loves. Despite this, I would still put him at about twenty-seven, twenty-eight.

“What don’t I understand, Josephine?” he asks me.

“You’re a drone. You have no concept of humanity anymore—which is why you’re no good to me as a therapist, and why the very thought of talking to you about something as private as Luke makes my skin crawl.”

He sighs. “Who else do you think you’ll get?” He folds his arms, starting to get impatient. “There’s no one left who hasn’t been cured. Everyone is a ‘drone’.”

Ain’t that the truth.

I sink back against the comfy window seat, depressed.

“The only people left who feel anger are the Bloods.”

“And me, apparently.”

“Allegedly,” he reminds me pointedly.

“Yeah, allegedly. So to sum up—Luke isn’t on the agenda, today or any day.”

Charlotte grew up with her nose in a book and her head in the clouds. At fourteen, her English teacher told her that the short story she'd submitted was wildly romantic, so she decided to write a novel. Thus began her foray into epic fantasy and dystopian sci-fi, with sweeping romances, heroic adventures, and as much juicy drama as she could possibly squeeze in.

Her first novel, Arrival, was published at age seventeen, and was followed by Descent, which launched The Strangers of Paragor series, an adventure fantasy for teenagers.

She then wrote her first adult fantasy novel, Avery, the prologue of which came to her in a very vivid dream. Her second adult novel, Fury, is the first in a romantic science-fiction series called The Cure, set in a dystopian future.

Charlotte currently lives in Sydney, having just finished a Masters in Screenwriting from the Australian Film, Television & Radio School. With her television pilot script, she won the Australian Writer's Guild Award for Best Unproduced Screenplay of 2013. She will, however, always be a novelist at heart, still unable to get her nose out of the books.